Friday Rant - Calorie what what??!

We have so many yummy foods available to us nowadays. If you think back 100 or even 50 years ago, the American diet was much less varied, and people ate the food that they cooked (or their family cooked), for the most part. People did eat out, but it wasn't quite as prevalent as it is now. This is in part because women are more often than not working just as much as their husbands and the percentage of stay-at-home parents has considerably reduced. And who wants to work all day long, then maybe hit the gym afterwards, then come home and cook a full dinner for the family? Not likely. I don't even like to cook in evenings when I get home, and I live alone.

So what do we do? We have aisles of frozen prepared foods at the grocery store, take-out and dining out. While I don't care for frozen dinners, I do love take out and eating out. The problem is that you never really know what's in the food. Read this article about some of the various chains (for instance, Dunkin' Donuts smoothies pack a major sugar punch and IHOP's omelet feast will cost you 1335 calories ) - in NY they're forcing them to provide the nutritional information on their menus, and it turns out that some of their meals (just an entree, not including drinks, appetizers, and dessert) come to more than half (if not almost all) an average person's daily calories! They're getting a bit better about not adding trans fats to their food (I recently read that because of the regulations, a chain fast food restaurants might actually be a safer bet, concerning trans fat, than would a chain sit-down restaurant). But we really don't know what all they used to cook the food (olive oil vs butter vs partially hydrogenated vegetable oil plus sodium galore).

And the problem is that they restaurants want people to come back and eat there again (imagine that?!), and well, gosh darnit, fat tastes good! So they make it unhealthy because they know if people eat it and like it, they'll come back. But if they make it really healthy, it might still taste good (healthy food can taste good, really it can), it just doesn't have that same pop of "wow!" that the fatty stuff has. Unless it's really fresh yummy stuff like raspberries off the bush from the farmer's market, then it's expensive. So while we all complain that restaurants are hiding mega-doses of calories in our meals, we're basically encouraging them to do just that.

If I ate out or got take out every night, I think that I'd have tons of trouble keeping my weight to a healthy level. That's just me, and perhaps it's because when I do happen to eat out, I'm not shy about eating a lot. Since I don't eat out often, I figure when I do, it's a treat. So maybe if I ate out more often, I'd be more circumspect in what I chose to eat.

So here I am, ranting that the restaurants pack their meals with calories and trans fats, admitting that I eat plenty of it when I do go out, and pointing out that it's very difficult to provide home cooked food (unless you eat home cooked food from the freezer, like I do) with how much we have to work just to put that very food on the table. So this is a true rant - I'm complaining about it, but not really providing solutions. Maybe all my smart readers can help me out with this?